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Prequel is building a community-driven approach to finding software bugs

Startups /

Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-driven approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they find with the broader cybersecurity community, which allows companies to patch up their security holes before something catastrophic happens. Prequel is looking to bring that same approach to software. The startup is building a database of software failure patterns or […]

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Kalshi CEO admits enlisting influencers to dis Polymarket in a now-deleted podcast segment

Venture /

Kalshi’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees did ask social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI’s raid on the home of his arch rival, the CEO of Polymarket.  Both of these companies offer competing events-betting markets, a new kind of betting industry where people wager about the outcomes

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G2 Ventures Partners is raising $750 million for a third fund

Climate /

G2 Venture Partners, the high-profile firm that spun out of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is raising a third fund with a target of $750 million, TechCrunch has learned.  The raise, which was disclosed in a regulatory filing, is a bullish vote of confidence in climate and sustainability startups, while other investors have voiced cautious

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UnitedHealthcare’s Optum left an AI chatbot, used by employees to ask questions about claims, exposed to the internet

Security /

Healthcare giant Optum has restricted access to an internal AI chatbot used by employees after a security researcher found it was publicly accessible online, and anyone could access it using only a web browser.  The chatbot, which TechCrunch has seen, allowed employees to ask the company questions about how to handle patient health insurance claims

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Activate and The Engine Accelerator team up to train scientists to become founders 

Climate /

The road from scientist to founder is well trodden, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Those pitfalls are why, over the last decade, several programs have sprung up to help smooth the path for technical founders. Now, two prominent programs, Activate and The Engine Accelerator, have decided they can give founders an even bigger advantage

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Yahoo cybersecurity team sees layoffs, outsourcing of ‘red team,’ under new CTO

Security /

Yahoo laid off around 25% of its cybersecurity team — known as The Paranoids — over the last year, TechCrunch has learned. Overall, the company has laid off or lost through attrition 40 to 50 people from a total of 200 employees in the cybersecurity team since the start of 2024, according to multiple current

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Evinced’s $55M C round will help bring its accessibility dev tools (and AI) to Europe

Startups /

Making sure your software is accessible is fast becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have, and Evinced is one of a wave of startups helping make that happen. The company is about to expand to Europe, where new accessibility regulations are about to take effect, and has raised $55 million to fuel the expansion. Evinced

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Cartesia claims its AI is efficient enough to run pretty much anywhere

Startups /

It’s becoming increasingly costly to develop and run AI. OpenAI’s AI operations costs could reach $7 billion this year, while Anthropic’s CEO recently suggested that models costing over $10 billion could arrive soon. So the hunt is on for ways to make AI cheaper. Some researchers are focusing on techniques to optimize existing model architectures — i.e.

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Researchers find security flaws in Skoda cars that may let hackers remotely track them

Transportation /

Security researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the infotainment units used in some Skoda cars that could allow malicious actors to remotely trigger certain controls and track the cars’ location in real time. PCAutomotive, a cybersecurity firm specializing in the automotive sector, unveiled 12 new security vulnerabilities impacting the latest model of the Skoda Superb

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Embedded data analytics startup Embeddable is still handpicking its customers despite strong demand

Fundraising /

Tom Gardiner and Harry Marshall founded Trevor.io in 2016 as a no-code business intelligence platform to help non-data people run analysis on their internal data. That business was solid, but customers increasingly started asking the company for access to the same tools for their customer-facing data. Gardiner told TechCrunch that the company initially resisted the

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